This marks my first ever Wine Blogging Wednesday, a tradition started by Lenn over at Lenndevours sometime in the Neolithic period of the wine blogging timeline. I’m happy to finally join in the festivities.

The wine type this month, chosen by Tim at Winecast, is Old World Riesling, which worked out great for me. I just happened to be putting together an Alsace tasting this Friday with a new tasting group so the timing was perfect. Good times.

The Wine: 2005 Kuentz-Bas Riesling Tradition

The wine I drank last night was a dry Riesling produced by Kuentz-Bas. It’s from their low end “Tradition” line of wines, and is imported by Kermit Lynch. It cost 16 bucks.

The Region: Alsace

Alsace (sounds kinda like “All Sauce”) is cool because, unlike most other French wine regions, the producers there put the variety of the grapes used right on the label. Which is nice for us Americans. Less thinking and mental gymnastics and/or Googling.

In general The Sauce has a warm – sometimes even hot – dry growing season. The long, skinny region is shaped a lot like Napa Valley and sits in the rain shadow of the Vosges mountains to the west and enjoys the moderating influence of the Rhine river to the east. Alsace sits right near the western border of Germany in eastern France. Which basically means you can’t throw a rock without hitting a German eating schnitzengruben.

It’s a wicked little spot to grow grapes, and the main varieties planted there are Riesling, Gewurztraminer, Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc and Muscat. They even grow a bit of Pinot noir, which warms my cockles.

So what’s the wine like?

• It’s light yellow with a greenish tinge.
• It smells like “petrol” (or kerosene/rubber), which you’ll either love or hate. There’s also some floral stuff going on and citrus fruit aromas.
• It’s dry. This isn’t a sweet wine. At all.
• Lots of acid. Medium plus to high.
• But it’s medium bodied, which is a pretty reliable marker for Alsatian Rieslings. Nothing is worse than thin acidic wine IMO. Happily, there’re no issues with that here.
• Medium alcohol, at least to my palate. As far as Old world Rieslings go it’s a bit on the higher side at 12.5%. You’ll see some German ones with a lot less since they often can’t add sugar to their musts to bump things up.
• It doesn’t taste like a whole lot to be honest. We’re talking sour lime and citrus mixed with the petrol smells. If you wanted to get all romantic you might say it has “minerality,” but I’m not, so I won’t.

Winemaking Mystery

I like to try and rip apart wines and try to figure out how they’re made. It doesn’t always work, but it’s good practice and fun if you’re a wine geek.

Most of this one is easy. It’s obvious that the wine never saw a barrel, so it was steel fermented and aged. It’s pretty acidic and isn’t at all buttery, so it probably didn’t go through malolactic fermentation (it didn’t). It may have been chaptalized, but I can’t be certain.

The only real mystery might be the pronounced petrol aroma so early in the wine’s life. I’m told petrol usually comes with age in Rieslings. (I wouldn’t know. I’m American, I drink my wines young ).

I think the mystery can probably be explained by the weather. 2005 was a hot, dry year, with rains in July and August followed by a warm dry harvest window in September and October.

The chemical thought to be responsible for the petrol aroma, called TDN (TrimethylDihydroNaphthalene), is correlated to low yields, warm weather and sun exposure, increased water stress and high acid.

It all fits. In 2005 The Sauce was warm to hot, yields were limited, there was plenty of sun, dry farming was employed, there wasn’t a ton of rain, and according to the assays I ran on the wine there’s plenty of acid. Check it out:

The pH for this guy is 3.12, which is really low (high acid)

and the TA, or titratable acidity, came in at 6.4 g/L. Of that, 1.2 g/L is malic acid, which is the “greener” tasting of the acids. Tartaric acid, the remainder (5.2 g/L), is thought by some to taste more citrus-y. So maybe that’s where all the sour citrus fruit flavors are coming from.

Mystery solved? Who knows, but the process is kinda fun. Probably more thought than you’ve ever put into a 16 dollar bottle of wine before (me too), but what the heck.

The Final Score

3 Floridian Super delegates.

If you’re learning about French wines and Alsace in particular, this is a great wine to try. And the price is right. Kermit Lynch for the win!

Capozzi Winery